THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE IRISH QUESTION:

This article builds on theoretical work in the social movements literature that uses "master frames" (Snow and Benford 1992) to account for the cyclical clustering of social movement activity within certain historical periods. I identify "master frame alignment" as the dynamic process by which social movement actors rhetorically transform the master frames within a cycle of protest to make them resonate more clearly with a movement's unique social and historical situation. Just as frame alignment processes serve to link a movement organization's activities, goals, and ideology with those of a potential group of adherents, master frame alignment processes link the activities, goals, and ideology of a movement organization with those espoused within the broader symbolic atmosphere of the social movement. I present historical data from Irish newspapers and political documents to show how the Irish Sinn Féin movement, seeking self-determination during the early twentieth century, rhetorically reconstructed the master frames generated by the League of Nations in order to better exploit this particular window of political opportunity.     

Corporate Giving in Australia: An Analysis of Motives and Barriers

This study comprises data analysis of data collected by McNair Ingenuity Research as part of the 2005 Giving Australia study, which estimated the total value of corporate giving for the year 2003‐04 at $3.3 billion. This was contributed by 67% of all Australian businesses. Business giving was found to comprise 68% monetary donations, 16% goods and 16% services. This article concentrates on the monetary donations of businesses, reporting on the motives and barriers businesses named for making donations. More than 80% of businesses are motivated to give, at least in part, by altruism, with larger businesses (by number of employees and turnover) more likely to claim benefits in terms of enhancements to employee morale, the organisation's image, supplier/customer relationships and the general level of publicity they were able to attract. The most significant barrier to giving named by both businesses who made a donation and those who did not was that business resources were committed elsewhere. Looking at how additional giving might be stimulated among those already giving to the sector revealed that the most generous businesses also cited more barriers to giving suggesting that they give greater consideration to their giving and the drawbacks thereof.     

The current state of the labor queue: National and regional Evidence

We employ vector autoregressive techniques to determine the current state of the labor queue. Unemployment rate differentials have narrowed in recent years, potentially due to a change in the queue ordering, though a tight labor market and a stable queue would yield similar results. We find no evidence that the queue ordering has changed, which brings into question the resiliency of gains made by minority groups. We employ the same techniques to reveal the state of the queue across geographic regions and find that substantial differences exist across regions, implying variation in the relative labor force status of demographic groups.     

International guidelines and the inclusion of disabled people. The Ugandan story

Uganda has made much progress towards including disabled people in its mainstream development, particularly in the political agenda. The exact process by which this has been achieved and the relationship between this and international guidelines and legislation are not known. This study undertakes to examine this from two specific perspectives: (1) How do international documents relevant to disabled people relate to national legislation in Uganda? (2) What can this comparison, together with the perceptions of stakeholders, tell us about how the legislation and services could improve? International legislation and Ugandan legislation is reviewed and compared. Data from 5 semi‐structured key informant interviews and 6 focus group discussions involving a total of 38 people are collected and analysed. The themes arising from the data are related to the documents, legislation, policies and other relevant literature. The results examine the barriers to service provision; the role of change; the importance of representation; policy and legislation issues; and the effects of devolution. Five specific findings relate to how legislation and services can improve: more resources to increase access for disabled people; strong leadership and collaboration between Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) funding bodies and governments; awareness raising and training; representation from all impairment groups; and raising the profile of disabled people through further legislation.     

MODEL-ASSISTED HIGHER-ORDER CALIBRATION OF ESTIMATORS OF VARIANCE

In survey sampling, interest often centres on inference for the population total using information about an auxiliary variable. The variance of the estimator used plays a key role in such inference. This study develops a new set of higher‐order constraints for the calibration of estimators of variance for various estimators of the population total. The proposed strategy requires an appropriate model for describing the relationship between the response and auxiliary variable, and the variance of the auxiliary variable. It is therefore referred to as a model‐assisted approach. Several new estimators of variance, including the higher‐order calibration estimators of the variance of the ratio and regression estimators suggested by Singh, Horn & Yu and Sitter & Wu are special cases of the proposed technique. The paper presents and discusses the results of an empirical study to compare the performance of the proposed estimators and existing counterparts.     

Bayesian analysis of a marked point process: Application in seismic hazard assessment

Point processes are the stochastic models most suitable for describing physical phenomena that appear at irregularly spaced times, such as the earthquakes. These processes are uniquely characterized by their conditional intensity, that is, by the probability that an event will occur in the infinitesimal interval (t, t+Δt), given the history of the process up tot. The seismic phenomenon displays different behaviours on different time and size scales; in particular, the occurrence of destructive shocks over some centuries in a seismogenic region may be explained by the elastic rebound theory. This theory has inspired the so-called stress release models: their conditional intensity translates the idea that an earthquake produces a sudden decrease in the amount of strain accumulated gradually over time along a fault, and the subsequent event occurs when the stress exceeds the strength of the medium. This study has a double objective: the formulation of these models in the Bayesian framework, and the assignment to each event of a mark, that is its magnitude, modelled through a distribution that depends at timet on the stress level accumulated up to that instant. The resulting parameter space is constrained and dependent on the data, complicating Bayesian computation and analysis. We have resorted to Monte Carlo methods to solve these problems.